Second Life Podcast: Tracy Sun on Making the Leap From Science to Fashion

Welcome to MyDomaine'sSecond Life podcast, a series spotlighting successful women who've made major career changes—and fearlessly mastered the pivot. Hosted by Hillary Kerr, co-founder and chief innovation officer at MyDomaine's parent company, Clique Brands, each episode will give you a direct line to women who are game changers in their fields.

Tracy Sun may be at the helm of the impressive fashion-tech startup Poshmark, but she doesn't consider herself a "fashion person." She studied biology and psychology in college with the intention of pursuing a career in neuroscience. Little did she know that she'd trade medical school for business school and leave behind New York City for the tech mecca that is Silicon Valley. Sun explains how she made the transition from science to startup in Episode 10 of Second Life.

With a passion for neuroscience, Sun spent her undergraduate years interning at hospitals and research institutes before landing a job working with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's patients. As much as she loved the work, after getting a look into the lives of the people she looked up to in the industry, she began to question her future in the field. "At some point pretty early in my career I said I don't think this is right for me," she says. "I was devastated. This was the only world I knew."

Despite the fact that science had been her whole life, Sun decided to make a drastic shift and enroll in business school. "For me, getting my MBA was a crash course in the non-science world," she says. Armed with her new knowledge, Sun got a taste of the startup life in New York while working with an up-and-coming fashion company in Brooklyn. She went on to start her own fashion company in the city—however, the venture was "a spectacular failure," Sun says. This led her all the way to Silicon Valley, where she met her co-founder, Manish Chandra, and conjured up Poshmark, the social marketplace for fashion, as a way to marry her understanding of fashion commerce with emerging technology. Now a success in an unexpected field, Sun's advice to her younger self is simple: "Just don't sweat it. It's gonna be fine."